Hiking the third most dangerous outdoor activity

I was reading in the Scouting magazine for October, 2008 and the author of an article called "Don't get sick on the trail" cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study listing hiking as the third most dangerous outdoor activity. Not being very impressed with statistics, I looked up the original story. Here it is:

http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2008/r080610.htm

The CDC news release had an expired link to the Wilderness Medical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.

http://www.wms.org/

After a bit of searching I found the following report:

Flores AH, Haileyesus T, Greenspan AI. National estimates of outdoor recreational injuries treated in emergency departments, United States, 2004-2005. Wilderness Environ Medicine. 2008;19:91-98.

Unfortunately, that link was also broken, but I did find the original report at:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/E-News/2008/06-12-2008.doc.

• Snowboarding, sledding, and hiking were associated with the highest number of injuries requiring emergency department visits.
• More than two-thirds of patients treated for outdoor-related injuries were male, with the greatest number of injuries affecting young men ages ten to 35.
• Half of all injuries treated were fractures, strains and sprains, and most injuries involved the head and neck or limbs.
• 6.5% of all outdoor injuries in the study were diagnosed as traumatic brain injury, or TBI- a serious injury that helmets, when used appropriately, can help prevent.

The report also noted:

Skiing was the most common of the activities in the “other” category- more than half of the injuries classified as “other” were skiing-related.

Some of the observations of the study made me wish someone would pay me to do this kind of study, such as "Falling while moving at a relatively fast speed increases someone’s likelihood of being injured if they fall." That would never have occurred to me. Actually, what would never have occurred to me is that someone would pay me to say that. Anyway, back to the study.

This may be a valid study, but it occurs to me that they are comparing a lot of very dissimilar activities. I would just guess that many more people go hiking each year than go snowboarding. It is probably easy to guess that there will be more injuries from hiking than from some other types of activities, such as bungee jumping or sky diving. But the absolute number of injuries is meaningless, unless there is an adjustment for the number of people participating in the activity.

I finally did find the entire report at:

http://www.wemjournal.org/pdfserv/i1080-6032-019-02-0091.pdf

The Study notes that 29.8 million people participated in hiking in 2004. What is more important, the overall rate of injury, including very high risk groups, was 4.6 injuries per 100,000. That means that out of 100,000 people participating in hiking only less than five of them will be injured at any given time. Compare this with a FATALITY rate of 13.61 per 100,000 of population for motor vehicle accidents. You can see the statistics at

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

You are more than three times more likely to die from a motor vehicle accident than you are to be injured while hiking. This doesn't diminish the need to be careful while in the outdoors but it would be nice sometime if the people writing articles for magazines wouldn't use statistics as propaganda.

It seems to be a lot safer to hike around in the desert than it is to drive there on the freeway.